Thursday, March 16, 2017

Among Americans intellectuals Camille Paglia stands out for
her fearless honesty and integrity. Not one to run with the crowd Paglia
possesses a refreshing level of integrity. You may agree or disagree with her
analysis and her opinions, but she acquired them with her own work. Rarely if
ever will you hear her trumpeting anyone’s party line. This has placed her on
the outside. She has never taught at an elite academic institution. It has not
been easy, but it has helped her to be sui generis, unique, original, one of a
kind.

The free-ranging interview
touched on numerous topics. Without any further ado, I present a few.

Take this paean to men’s work, to
the work that men do because women do not want to do it or are not capable of
doing it. Paglia is especially torqued at feminists who disrespect men,
especially men who do physical labor. She does not say so in this article, but
many of these men and the women who love them voted for Trump in the last
election:

It is
an absolute outrage how so many pampered, affluent, upper-middle-class
professional women chronically spout snide anti-male feminist rhetoric, while
they remain completely blind to the constant labor and sacrifices going on all
around them as working-class men create and maintain the fabulous
infrastructure that makes modern life possible in the Western world. Only a tiny
number of women want to enter the trades where most of the nitty-gritty
physical work is actually going on—plumbing, electricity, construction. Women
have played virtually no role in the erection of those magnificent towers in
every major city in the world. It's men who operate the cranes or set the
foundations or wash windows on the 85th floor. It's men who troop out at 2:00
AM during an ice storm to restore power to neighborhoods where falling trees
have brought down live wires. It's men who mix the stinking, toxic cauldrons to
spread steaming hot tar on city roofs. Last year in a nearby town, I drove by a
huge, chaotic scene where emergency workers in hazmat suits were struggling
with a giant pipe break, as raw sewage was pouring into the street. Of course
all those workers up to their knees in a torrent of thick brown water were men!
I've seen figures indicating that 92 per cent of people killed
on the job are men—and it's precisely because men are heroically doing most of
the dangerous jobs in modern society. The bourgeois blindness of feminist
leaders to low-status working-class labor by men is morally corrupt!

Point well taken.
Feminists want to see more women in the board room. Why, Paglia
suggests, don’t they march to have more women operating cranes, paving the
streets or fixing a broken water main? Apparently, these jobs are not suitable
for a proper lady. This may well be the case—you will not get an argument from
me-- but does it not give the lie to the feminist theories about gender as a social construct?

Apparently, today’s women are not quite as strong as yesterday’s.
So says Paglia:

I argue
that country women of the agrarian era were physically and mentally stronger
than today's high-profile, feminism-spouting women careerists, doing their
Pilates and spinning routines at the pricey gym.

Paglia calls out Sheryl Sandberg, the queen of leaning in,
for creating a deceptively dishoneset public persona:

I find
Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg insufferably smug and entitled. I thought her bestselling
book, Lean In, was
utterly dishonest in failing to acknowledge how the affluent lifestyle of women
executives like herself requires a rotating squad of servants and nannies, whom
she has carefully kept invisible.

Yes, indeed, she is saying. A woman can have it all, can be
the corporate executive and run a home and bring up her children… if she has an
army of servants and nannies. Obviously, very, very few women can do this.

When asked about efforts on college campuses to shut down
speech and to proselytize the gospel of multicultural diversity, Paglia lays
the blame on the administrative state. No, not the federal bureaucracy but on the
multitude of overpaid administrators who have taken power on college campuses
and who are doing everything in their power to make it
appear that they are needed.

She explains:

The
rapid, uncontrolled spread of overpaid administrators on college campuses over
the past 30 years has marginalized the faculty, downgraded education, and
converted students into marketing tools. Administrators are locked in a
mercenary commercial relationship with tuition-paying parents and in a coercive
symbiosis with intrusive regulators of the federal government. Young people
have been far too passive about the degree to which their lives are being
controlled by commissars of social engineering who pay lip service to
liberalism but who are at root Stalinist autocrats who despise and suppress
individualism. There is no excuse whatever for the grotesque rise in tuition
costs, which has bankrupted families and imposed crippling debt on students
trying to start their lives. When will young people wake up to the connection
between rampant student debt and the administrator-sanctioned suppression of
free speech on campus? Follow the money—the yellow brick road leads to the new
administrator master class.

“Stalinist autocrats”… where have we heard that before?

Paglia does not let postmodern academics off the hook. She
calls them “ignorant fakes.” Who knew? She adds:

Post-structuralists
are ignorant fakes. They know so little about high-level intellectual history
that they truly think that Foucault invented the major ideas they hail him for.
He was a thief who concealed his real sources (such as Emile Durkheim and
Erving Goffman). Foucault was a cynical game-player who knew literally nothing
about any period or discipline before the French Revolution. The army of
humanities professors who fell hard for Foucault are pitifully naïve. I don't
give a damn about them—but they should be punished with derision and loss of
reputation for their amoral destruction of the next generation of scholars.

For my part I think that Foucault was better than she thinks
he was. And yet, what his work has become in the hands of today’s American
academics, people who owe their jobs to their ability to adhere to the right
ideology, is a disgrace. Of course, Foucault, wherever he is today, is probably
cheering them on.

1 comment:

I never tire of reading her. I don't always agree with her and sometimes she writes about things I know little about but she is enlightening. Refreshing. I simply regret she is not 20 years younger so we could benefit from her work even longer.